Customer Reviews

Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan

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I was very pleased with this book , but also somewhat disappointed. The way Allison delves into each subject is astounding, and her own personal experiences illustrate the culture so that an American can understand it. What disappointed me, however, was how Allison becomes bogged down in explaining everything in psychological jargon. I know as an anthropologist, she must address certain things, but I ended up just skimming the sections.

The first chapters of the book cover Japanese comics, or manga. It does not cover popular manga, but rather how certain running themes reflect on Japanese culture. She particuarly looks into "ero manga," which is erotic, adult comics. She makes some shocking insights, but nothing that isn't mirrored in the U.S. She also briefly looks into children's television shows and hostess clubs.

The second part deals with mothers in Japan. This section of the book was so thoroughly interesting it made me wish the entire book covered the topic. The amount of work that the women must do is incredible. She also looks into Japanese schools, especially nursery schools. Allison's own personal experiences and her interviews with Japanese women really flavor this section.

The third section wraps up with censorship in Japan. Allison delves more into politics here, and the section didn't grab me as much as the others. It is still interesting, and the information is well delivered.

If you can put aside her psychological ramblings and concentrate on the actual writings, this book is wonderfully informative. Recommended.

In all honesty, the book was not exactly what I expected to be. By the title and description, you would think it was about pornographic comics in Japan. In actuality, the book turned out better than I anticipated. Anne Allison uses the comics factor as to illustrate one of the fathomless views of how women in Japan are viewed. She deals with certain topics such as mother-son incest and the concern for its growth within Japanese mass-culture; the role of women as mothers, wives, and basically, the "other gender".

Ms. Allison has outdone herself in including Marxist ideas into her theories concerning subjects pertaining to sexuality and gender roles. After reading "Permitted and Prohibited Desires", the anthropoligical differences between our culture and the non-Western cultures are clearly evident. The results, however, are not too pleasing.

Permitted And Prohibited Desires by Anne Allison is a very serious study about gender and sexuality in modern Japan, focusing very much on the relationships between women and family, women and the work place, mothers and sons, sexuality and censorship and how woman fit into Japanese culture in general.
The author does a great job at making a foundation for the book, based on years of fieldwork in middle-class Tokyo with a solid understanding of anthropology, Marxist theory and psychology.
I believe she does a great job finding the differences between facts and fiction, in tracing many of the Western influences that have mixed into and changed the non-Western culture that is today's Japan.
A must for any library on Japan, its history or culture.

Let me put my above statement into better context: What I mean is that if a person is only imterested in manga, they probably will not enjoy this book. This not an introduction to erotic manga book, but instead is a book that deals with certain aspects of manga made for males. It foes into such things as panty shots and the male gaze and the domination of women by men in adult manga for males and women. Very good stuff, but for those who want info on manga itself, don't read here, few manga are covered here and the author onl uses a handful of stories. Manga known to english readers are not mentioned at all. Another thing unless you are well versed in the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan much of this book will seem very verbose and uncomprehensible. Skip the first chapter if you must it is unnecessary to enjoy the book. Also covered in this book are Japanese mothers and how they prepare their children for nursery school. You will not believe all that these women go through. Also the subject of Mother-son incest is brought out. a subject that was popular in Japan during the late 70' and early 80's in popular culture.

Readers commenting on Permitted and Prohibited Desires resent the heavy theoretical apparatus--thee poorly rehashed Marx and Freud, the savant references to feminist theory, the abstract discussions in the introductory sections of each chapter that seem to be a mandatory passage in anthropological dissertations. Why doesn't the author get straight to the point, they complain. I disagree. I would argue, on the contrary, that the openness to theory is the crucial element that saves this book from racial prejudice, and the reader from perverse voyeurism.

In focusing on sexual desire and its representations in popular culture, Anne Allison addresses a risky topic. Japan is known as a society where child pornography is widely accessible, and where smutty manga are read in the public places of the commuter train or the convenience store. Foreigners are often drawn to these most sordid aspects of popular culture, which are reflected in media reports or popular essays about Japan. Maid cafés are now part of the Harajuku youth culture circuit, and many foreign otaku join their Japanese counterparts in the specialized shops in Akihabara that cater to every known perversion. This foreign interest for Japanese modern `ero-guro' subculture is a kind of second-order voyeurism: people peeping at people peeping into keyholes.

Investigating erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, the representation of sexual body parts, along with lunchboxes prepared by mothers for their preschool kids and other aspects of school discipline, is bound to be provocative. In addressing these issues, theory acts as body armor, a kind of chastity belt that protects the scholar from temptation or abuse. What binds these themes together is the ideology of motherhood as both the `real' of Japanese society (where the means of production and reproduction originate), and its repressed `other' (women don't get equal treatment with men on the job market or in tertiary education). To quote from the introduction: "It is women, as mothers, who not only oversee the educational regimens of their children but also, and more importantly perhaps, fuse these closely with practices of maternal nurturance, indulgence, and love."

According to Anne Allison, Japan lives under the shadow of massive tits. Children programs on national television open with gigantic cartooned breasts flying into the air. Japanese men often suffer from a mother complex or mazakon: they have been too much indulged with. Mothers are still often excluded from the work place, but they rule at home, and they extend their influence far beyond the kitchen. Over-sexualized mothers or young girls feature in escapist leisure products, with versions specifically designed for children or teenagers. Mother-son incest stories appear in popular media, and they do not particularly shock people. Allison's book connects the dots to present a picture of motherhood in Japan that is both original and thought-provoking.

As mentioned in my opening paragraph, the author demonstrates a good command of critical theory. She not only has read her Marx and her Freud, she has digested and mastered them. I can only compare her scholarly agility with my own clumsiness--despite repeated readings of both original texts and commentary, I can only offer paraphrase or copy, and I am unable to reproduce the reasoning displayed in theory texts and apply it to new objects. Maybe this shortcoming is due to the fact that I have never been exposed to the classroom presentation or the seminar discussion of canonical texts--as far as psychoanalysis or critical theory are concerned, I am an autodidact, and I draw all my knowledge from solitary readings. Or maybe people are just born this way: you need a special talent to juggle with notions that have no equivalent in ordinary life, and that tend to contradict or subvert common sense and Cartesian reasoning. Or maybe again I have to indict my bourgeois self. My first reaction when reading a paragraph critical of the economic order, or of the economic science that sustains it, is to reject is as bunk. I was never a Marx boy, and never will be.

Let me take two examples to illustrate this point. First, I have certainly read more Slavoj Zizek than Allison had at the time of her writing--most of the Slovenian philosopher's books were published since, and I have only recently recovered from an addiction to them--, but she uses Zizek's works and "L'origine du monde" (to borrow the title of a painting once owned by Jacques Lacan) and the imperial institution in Japan: both are only too `real', too important and too central for national reproduction, and are therefore kept hidden from the public gaze. Similarly, I am somewhat familiar with Louis Althusser's critique of ideology, as I had to study this author to cram for my exams. But the grain fell on dry land. In this respect, Allison's use of Althusser concept of Ideological State Apparatus or ISA to analyze the obentô lunchbox prepared by mothers at home can only be characterized as a stroke of genius. It led me to reappraise the Marxist notion of ideology as something that is and will always be with us, as a part of who we are (who would be against mothers and apple pies, or okaasan and obentô?). From this perspective, there is obviously no end of ideology in sight.

This being said, the book also has its limits, which I find quite severe. First, it makes little use of Japanese authors and concepts. Second, it lacks historical depth. Third, the illustrations are a nuisance. For lack of space, I will only insist on this third critique. As everybody knows, Edo culture is best remembered for the pleasure quarters that gave birth to the iconic figures of the geisha and ukiyo-e painting, including the pornographic representations known as shunga art. Shouldn't modern erotic manga and photographs of nude young girls fall into the same category? I would strongly disagree, but that would lead us too far. In any case, I didn't choose to be exposed to scenes of nudity and sexual acts, however blurred, when acquiring this book. Obviously, judging from other readers' commentary, some people bought this book specifically for that reason.

Permitted and Prohibited Desires reads like a doctoral dissertation, which is unforgivable, considering it is not the author's first book. There are endless scholarly names dropped, as if to prove she's done her homework, as well as big chunks of poorly-digested Freud, Lacan, and Althusser. A good editor could have cut out half of what's here, which would have given the author space to put in more of her own research.

Her research is interesting. It's easy to find information about the aspects of Japanese culture that interest Westerners, but she describes things that do not transplant so easily. She also does a competent job of relating them to Japanese society as a whole.

Short summary: How interested are you in Japanese culture? If you want to go past the obvious, buy the book (but be prepared to wade through some unforgivable academese). If not, spend your money on manga.